Scoundrels and Thieves: Another Election Stolen. Location: Wisconsin

This time it’s Wisconsin. Another election stolen right before our eyes, exposed by statistical analysis.

Following the crooked footsteps of Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, the results of the recent vote in Wisconsin are statistically impossible. Numbers don’t lie. But, it seems, they do, and it’s either bad exit polls or bad GOP election officials that are telling tall tales.

Judging by history, I bet it’s the latter.

All five exit polls conducted in Wisconsin during the recent attempt to recall Republican state senators who backed Koch-funded Governor Walker show Democrats getting more votes than the official tally, sometimes by wide margins. Here’s an analysis by Richard Charnin:

According to Charnin, “Based on the True Vote Model and the exit polls, it is very likely that the District 8 and 14 recall elections were stolen. The Republicans control the state senate by a 17-16 majority, but the Democrats should be in control by 18-15.”

Any crank can spit out statistical analysis, so I’m presuming that Charnin, a trained mathematician and analytical software consultant, is an expert observer. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a freakin’ duck! The skewed election results don’t surprise me because it follows a pattern of mysterious discrepancies and GOP chicanery. Let’s remember Florida 2000:

Exit polls showed Al Gore won the Florida vote by three percent. The official result was he lost by like 0002 percent, and the Republicans on the Supreme Court crowned their man George Bush the winner in defiance of Constitutional procedure. Even though exit polls in other states matched official results closely, Florida was declared an anomaly, rather than presume Jeb Bush and friends stole three percent of the vote for his brother, Junior. Hmm, what’s more likely?

Add on 2004 when both Ohio and Florida exit polls showed John Kerry winning those states but the official result gave Bush victories, and the trend becomes obvious.

Exit polling in most other states aligned with the official results. In the two states that made all the difference and where Republicans controlled state government, however, statistical analysis proves that the official vote totals favoring Bush were impossible. Hmm.

I studied political science in college and took several courses on survey research, and the more I studied the science behind the statistics the more I realized that numbers don’t lie, people lie. Yes, people sometimes lie to pollsters, and pollsters can set up polls to show results they want. But if a thousand people are polled, and the poll is done scientifically, the accuracy of the results is within three percent no matter what. Get ten thousand people to answer survey questions — which is possible in big states like Ohio and Florida with 25 or more polling locations on election day — and the results will be within one percent accuracy. On the flip side, there’s a 1 in 20 chance that no matter how big the sample size, the results can’t be trusted. Statistics, though, are not the only evidence of voter fraud.

In 2000, Republican officials in south Florida hired some friends in the software business to write a program that could flip the results of an election undetected. The guy who wrote the program presumed it was an exercise in learning if it could be done, in order to catch Democrats trying to steal the election. He testified before the Ohio House about what he did after it became obvious to him and nearly everyone else who studied the election results that the election really was stolen … by the people he worked for!

Evidence of fraud is also all over the 2004 vote in Ohio, but the guy who was going to testify died the day before he was set to appear. He worked with then Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell (R, Obviously) to process the election results through third-party computer servers. It’s been well-documented that those computers, controlled by highly partisan Republicans, kicked into action the night of the election and gave back results far different than the exit polls.

Elections stolen from under our noses. I was there in Ohio in 2004 working as an exit pollster, and I counted results that favored Kerry a little more than expected. But the official result, after reworked by a “man in the middle” computer attack, favored Bush. I also worked in the national exit poll reporting center during the 2000 election, then as a field pollster in 2008 and as a field supervisor in 2010. I know how the exit polling business works from the inside out, and while far from infallible, I trust those results more than the official ones.

The duck is quacking like that annoying Aflac mascot. Will America hear it and take action to protect our electoral system?